New Year Predictions: Towards Impeachment

As lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleads guilty to fraud in the USA, Israeli police allegedly have evidence that Ariel Sharon's family received $3m in bribes. Sharon's son has already pleaded guilty to violating party funding laws.

Despite that, the BBC's John Simpson predicts that Sharon will wipe out both the Labour Party and Likud in the forthcoming election. Mind you, he is also predicting England to win the World Cup...

A more interesting prediction comes from stock analyst James J. Cramer: General Motors will go bankrupt and Rupert Murdoch will buy the Wall Street Journal from Dow Jones. Now that would be a meeting of minds indeed.

Nobody is seriously predicting that George W. Bush will be impeached in 2006, although for the life of me I cannot understand why the fact that a GOP-controlled Congress and Senate will almost certainly NOT impeach him should stop decent, honourable people from CALLING FOR his impeachment.

At E&P, Greg Mitchell has some fun by listing the papers that were calling for Clinton's impeachment back in September 1998, before the release of Kenneth Starr's report and despite polls showing that "while a majority of Americans wanted Congress to censure Clinton, they did not want it to boot him out of office."

Still, there seems to be plenty of talk of impeachment in local newspapers around the USA today. And the Green Party of the USA has just issued a press release calling for impeachment:

The evidence that President Bush has abused his office and betrayed the trust of the American people is now so overwhelming that failure to undertake impeachment would make Congress even more complicit in this administration's lawlessness.

The Greens previously called for impeachment in 2003, based on the lies that led the USA to war. They now add the following:

President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant in accord with the Fourth Amendment and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Numerous Bush Administration policies -- denial of due process, extraordinary rendition, secret detention centers, and torture at various sites, including Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay -- have violated U.S. and international law.

Congress must investigate whether the White House endorsed the use of outlawed weapons materials such as depleted uranium.